I can’t find anything about this online, but on the local NBC news this morning, they reporrted that Comedy Central was not asking YouTube to pull all the clips from its show, only full episodes — a reasonable and wise position. It seems that cooler heads prevailed. YouTube is a magnificent new means of distribution and promotion. Now the key will be for Comedy Central to also make money on those clips; once that happens, the networks will fall over themselves to put their own stuff up.

Right, but if they’re full episodes I thought they weren’t supposed to be up there anyway. Because last spring, YouTube said they were instigating 10 minute limit on uploads to address copyright issues.

redjoker

sure but it wasn’t really enforced. I saw 44 minute videos floating around there, and some users split whole episodes into smaller part to avoid that banishment.

But, what if they are trying to make money from small videos? I personally believe that that would encourage a landslide movement which coould easily be the end for most of the sites similar to YouTube

The Viacom PR line on this matter – as repeated in the NY Post is…
“By yesterday it was understood that the media conglomerate had issues only with entire episodes – not selected clips.”

The two segments they took down that I had uploaded were individual interviews with Steve Wozniak ~6 minutes on the Colbert Report and a Daily Show interview with Al Franken ~7minutes. I can send you DMCA notices I received from you tube if you’d like. Many other takedowns were similar lengths.

The five minute rule doesn’t seem to be accurate to me either. I think more likely that this first set of takedown requests (a list of urls of infringing content) was just the opening salvo in hardball negotiations by Viacom – with fans who had uploaded and/or linked to content on YouTube as the unwitting victims as their site links are now broken.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised, based on what’s come out over the last few days, to discover that the parent company told them “Get the clips off that YouTube thing! All of them! What are we spending all that money on our own website for?” so that’s exactly what they told YouTube. Then, a few days later having ready comments from their audience on why what they were doing was so stupid, they realised the benefits to having their content on YouTube. That’s when I think they called a halt to it and changed the story to “full episodes only.”